CookBook | Devpost

Inspiration

One of our team members is a vegetarian that had a problem getting a nice variety of foods between his busy schedule. He wanted a way to get a variety of healthy food ideas into his diet that met his fitness goals and fit into his college budget.

What it does

Our web application allows a user to enter fields into the application that provide information about a user's dietary needs, whether the user wants to gain, lose, or maintain their weight, and what the user's budget is. Based on this information, recipes are generated that fit into the dietary needs, the caloric intake needs for the fitness goal inputted, the budget of the consumer. Along with recipes, ingredients and nutrition facts can also be seen. Users can like and share different recipes, which provides a social media aspect and allows a user to receive personalized recipes based on foods they like. Similar to Spotify, recipes that people like can be browsed and liked as well.

How we built it

We built this web application using Express.js with a NodeJS framework. Using Natural Language Form and Material Design, we were able to create a sleek UI that is intuitive to use. Recipes were generated using Stop & Shop's Peapod API. MongoDB was the database we used to store data about recipes.

Challenges we ran into

Finding data that applied to our web application was challenging since extracting the right information took time and effort. Filtering results in a clean format that are relevant using the Peapod API also required a lot of work with web scraping and Regex to have successful results.

What we learned

We learned that using older libraries is not a good idea since they have little support to implement software solutions to the problems we wanted to address.

What's next for CookBook

CookBook will eventually have meal plans that are more intelligent and more planned out for longer periods of time. Having a sharing capability to social networks like Instagram will allow the social aspect of it create an online community out of the application.